Monthly Archives: March 2011

This was the theme of summer conditioning the final year we coached. I was really proud of this program. I thought I’d finally found a theme which fit what we tried to accomplish like a glove. I found the program while cleaning out some folders on the hard drive. Funny how almost every file in the Tiger Sports folder brings back great memories. Practice schedules, travel lists, depth charts, strength and conditioning data, it all comes rushing back as I click through the files. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did. And if not, too dang bad, because now I have a whole computer folder full of things to share.

Brick by Brick

The foundation of a solid team is built brick by brick. Each individual brick in a foundation wall is unique and important. Every athlete in our summer conditioning program is unique and important to the foundation of the teams we are creating. The coaches act as the bricklayers to put the foundation together. Parents, administrators, former players and fans are the mortar which supports and holds the foundation together. The goal of our Tiger Strength and Conditioning program is to provide the tools so that every athlete can mold themselves into the best brick they can be.

(As I looked over this, it occurred to me that in our final season, some of our mortar didn’t realize, or accept, that it was the mortar and instead wanted to play the bricklayer. Our bricks were good, our plan was good, but as the wall of the team was beginning to come together, we lost our mortar and our wall crumbled.)

The 2008 Coach Hays Rules of the Road

1. Show up and work hard, every day.

2. We will work in groups. You will choose your own group of 6-10 people.

“You have to go back, in fact, to 2011. The Royals were dismal that year. They were also dismal the year before that and the year before that and the year before that and … well, you get the idea. Kansas City lost 100 games four times in the 2000s. And, oh, the stories from that time! The Royals once had a runner simply fall off first base, like a statue tipping over, and get picked off. They once had a player lose a fly ball in the sun because his prescription sunglasses had not yet arrived. They once had an outfielder who climbed the wall to catch a fly ball only to see it land on the warning track and bounce over his head. They once had their first batter of the game bat out of order.

The biggest problem then, strange as it may seem now (we are talking about the three-time-champion Royals), was that Kansas City had trouble finding, developing and affording good players. How did it turn around? How did the Royals reach the playoffs in 2013, win the World Series in ’15 and then dominate the latter part of the decade? Well, it was that minor league system … that amazing Kansas City Royals minor league system.

Believe it or not, back in those days when human beings played Jeopardy! and people thought LeBron James was going to win championships and Tiger Woods was going to break Jack Nicklaus’s career majors record, people also thought Dayton Moore was a complete failure. Moore will tell you this was mostly his fault. He made mistakes, and he did not explain himself well enough.”

I love the Royals. OK Mrs. Hays, I know I shouldn’t say “love”, especially about my hometown team, the Royals and the Chiefs, but…

Hope spring eternal. Thanks, Joe P. for this article and providing hope. This is going to be a rough year to be a Royals fan, but we are what we are.

If you, dear reader, are also a Royals fan, leave a comment with your favorite Royal memory. Good luck in 2011 to the Boys in Blue!

“If we, as Kansans and as religious communities, who are committed by our core values to look out for the marginalized and most vulnerable in our society, if we are not paying attention to this, what are we about? If this doesn’t matter to us, what does?”

“What happens to these folks when nobody is looking? We need to, as citizens of Kansas, hold ourselves accountable to the value of taking care of these people. Not just today, but tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.”

-Pastor Tobias Schlingensiepen

Topeka First Congressional United Church of Christ.

This time of the year (tax time) finds me moaning and groaning quite a bit about the money the governments take from me. This year was even worse than usual, with all the Tea Party Limbaugh Fiscal Conservative-ness floating around nowadays.

I am driving home the other night and listening to Kansas Public Radio. They ran a locally produced piece from a series they are doing on health care. This particular piece was a response to the Kansas governor’s proposal to close the Kansas Neurological Institute in Topeka, one of the last facilities for the severely disabled in Kansas. As Pastor Tobias Schlingensiepen began to talk (Listen at link below) about a sermon he gave, which has taken like wildfire throughout the Topeka clergy community, the lightbulb began to go off inside my head. Pastor Tobias nailed the very essence of what it means to be a HUMAN BEING, what it means to be a faith-filled member of society. After several minutes of self-reflection, a shadow of shame crept in and dimmed the light bulb in my head. I realized I had failed, I had placed my own selfishness in front of those who “marginalized and most vulnerable” people out there who need me to care. I should be willing to pay, not complaining to pay, the meager tax amount to help provide these citizens and their families a safety net. I should be doing more. I should be more Matthew 6. Shame on me.

“The molecular world has always been part of my mental furniture. I grew up on the outskirts of Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, famed for its research on energy, materials, and nuclear weapons. My dad was a physician and biomedical researcher who loved chemistry above all things, and who would interpret all of life’s vicissitudes in terms of some obscure chemical reaction or metabolic dysfunction. Learning chemistry, therefore, became a necessity for basic communication with my father. My neighbors were mostly physicists who would bring home spare bits and pieces from labs around the country. My friends and I sprayed rainbows of color on the bedroom wall with old prisms and played with a cube of depleted uranium metal that seemed impossibly heavy compared with the cubes of iron and aluminum that had been thoughtfully cut to exactly the same size. We were told that the uranium cube was only “slightly radioactive,” which nicely reflects the relaxed parenting attitudes of the 1960s. Our parents represented science as play and as a vehicle for fun. The microscopic world of molecules was as real to us as the grass in our backyards or our pets. We had no idea how lucky we were.”

I really don’t know what to say about this article. I have read it about seven times just for the heck of it. Entertaining and informative, right up my alley, baby!. If the explanations and the science behind the discoveries on the magnificent Swiss-Army knife molecule called ribonucleic acid (RNA) are not enough to intrigue you, how about the opening paragraph highlighted above? Magnificent work.